Pipe Dream (21 page)

Deveraux looked up at him and tried to maintain her defiant demeanor. But the look on his face was too evil to defy. She began to cry uncontrollably, her body bouncing up and down on the patches of weather-beaten grass like a doll on the string of some cruel puppeteer.

“Shut up,” Morgan said, digging into the inside pocket of his jacket after failing to find an extra magazine in the outside pockets.

“Please,” Deveraux said, sobbing and crawling backward in the grass. “I don’t know anything. I really don’t know anything.”

Morgan found a magazine and took it out of his pocket.

“Sure you know something,” Morgan said, slapping the magazine into the gun and chambering the first round. “You know you’re good at your job.”

His face crinkled into a self-satisfied smile as he continued to tease her.

“And I know I’m good at mine,” he said. “Now, I don’t know what was in that envelope that woman handed to you back at the Roundhouse, but—”

“Nothing,” Deveraux said, frantically shaking her head and dragging herself away from him. “There wasn’t anything in the envelope. . . .”

Morgan kicked Deveraux in the side and she screamed out in pain.

“Now, what was I saying before I was so rudely interrupted?” Morgan said. “Oh yeah. I remember now. I was asking you what was in the envelope back at the Roundhouse.”

“A number,” Deveraux said, choking on her words as she struggled to hold back the sobs.

“Whose number?” Morgan said.

“The Scotts,” she said. “But they’re harmless. They’re old. They don’t know anything about—”

Morgan bent down and slapped her across the head with the barrel of the gun. She winced and let out a strangled sob as a trickle of blood oozed from beneath her hairline.

“Where’s the envelope?” he said.

Deveraux coughed and choked on the blood that was starting to well up in her mouth.

“Where’s the envelope!” Morgan screamed, his eyes bulging as he reared back to pistol-whip her again.

“It’s in my purse,” she said, clutching at the cut on her forehead. “It’s in . . .”

Deveraux lost consciousness and fell against the ground. Morgan looked at her for a moment, contemplated leaving her there, then aimed the gun at her head and fired three times. When the reporter’s face was no longer recognizable, he walked back to Deveraux’s GMC Jimmy and found her purse.

As he looked over at the cameraman, still slumped between his camera and the ground, Morgan’s options became clear to him. Quite simply, he didn’t have any. The only thing he could do was take the money he’d made from the laundering scheme and leave town.

It should be simple enough to do that. After all, he had anticipated having to leave quickly one day, and he had squirreled away some of the money in a locker at 30th Street Station.

He didn’t even know how much it was. And he didn’t care. He was sure it would be enough to get him someplace where he could get started. He’d get the rest of the money later, when things cooled down some.

Sheldon was the one who had killed Podres, so he’d have to take care of the rest of his problems on his own. And if things went sour, Morgan knew that he could always cut a deal to help land the bigger fish.

But Morgan didn’t plan to let it come to that. Because there was only one thing in Philadelphia that he planned to catch—a train.

Captain Sheldon sat in the Command Center and thought about Morgan. He had proved to be Sheldon’s biggest asset and his biggest liability. His intercepting the tape from Moore had kept the truth hidden. But Morgan was a loose cannon who knew too much. And if Morgan had figured out that Sheldon was Podres’s killer, how much longer could Sheldon keep the truth hidden from the rest of the world?

The unpredictability of it went against Sheldon’s methodical nature. In everything he had ever done, Sheldon had always considered every possibility and made backup plans. But this thing had spun completely out of his control. There were too many intangibles, too many people digging for the truth, too many possibilities to consider, too many mistakes to cover up.

The longer the suspects remained at large, the more time people had to theorize. Sheldon knew that it was only a matter of time before the conspiracy theory became a serious consideration. And once the truth began to come out, Morgan would turn on him. That is, if he hadn’t done so already.

Sheldon looked over at Nelson and knew that there was no other way. He would have to leave, because the situation was rapidly collapsing into bedlam. He couldn’t stand by and watch it all come tumbling down on him. He had gone through too much to let that happen.

“Commissioner Nelson,” he said, standing up and grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair, “I’m going to get something to eat.”

“Why don’t you send somebody to get it for you? I need you here.”

“Sir, if I don’t get out of here and get some sunlight, I’m going to turn into a vampire,” Sheldon said, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “I’m only going across the street. Do you want anything?”

“No, not right now. But hurry back. Ramirez and Hillman will be here in a few minutes to report on the progress of the investigation.”

“I’ll only be a minute, sir.”

As Sheldon walked across the street and climbed into his car—looking back at the Command Center for the last time—he knew that he had to turn on Morgan before Morgan had a chance to turn on him.

Once he had taken care of that problem, he could go over to Abbottsford Hospital and eliminate the final loose end.

When Ramirez and Hillman walked into the Command Center on Park Avenue, it was like walking into a monastery where everyone had taken a vow of silence. The commissioner sat draped over a computer, his eyes glued to the monitor as if the answer to it all were going to jump off the screen. And Ramirez and Hillman stood awkwardly, looking and feeling very out of place.

“Commissioner,” Ramirez said quietly.

Nelson waited a few minutes before he responded. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” he said, still looking at the monitor. “I guess you have the warrants.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have any new leads?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Sir, we believe we’re looking for the wrong suspects in this shooting.”

Nelson leaned back and formed his hands into a church steeple. “Do you have evidence to prove that someone else committed this crime?”

“We’ve got a priest who says that Leroy was going away from the shooting right before it happened,” Ramirez said. “Which would make it nearly impossible for him to have committed this crime within the time frame we’re looking at. We believe that Black was committing a burglary at the time of the shooting, and Hillman has a witness who says that Black wasn’t with Leroy when Leroy left the scene of the shooting.”

Nelson stared at Ramirez and said nothing.

“Sir,” Hillman said, filling in the empty space, “there’s also the matter of the only eyewitness to the shooting—Darnell Thomas.”

“What about him?”

“I interrogated him this morning. He says that a tall white man with blond hair and blue eyes shot Podres.”

“Was that the extent of the description he gave?” Nelson asked.

Hillman flipped through his notes. “He said the shooter was tall, with blond hair and blue eyes, and that he was wearing a white shirt and black pants.”

“That could be anybody!” Nelson said, throwing up his hands and walking over to the door.

Hillman continued to flip through his notes. “There was something else,” he said. “I’ll find it in a minute.”

“If you ask me,” Ramirez said, “that description almost fits the captain.”

“If that’s supposed to be some kind of joke, Lieutenant, I fail to see the humor in it,” Nelson said, turning to face Ramirez.

“Where is the captain anyway, sir?” Hillman said.

“He went to get something to eat. He’ll be right back.”

Ramirez and Hillman looked at each other.

“How long ago did he leave?” Ramirez said.

Nelson looked at Ramirez with an expression that bordered on contempt.

“You know, Ramirez, instead of standing here questioning me, you need to have your ass out there finding these suspects.”

“Whether or not they shot Podres?” Ramirez said, his words drenched with sarcasm.

“It’s not our job to determine guilt,” Nelson said. “Our job is to gather enough evidence to allow the district attorney to try them.”

“Commissioner,” Ramirez said, “what real evidence do we have? Some lady saying she saw Leroy go in the house a few seconds before the shots were fired? Some paperwork on some theft cases that indicate Leroy and Black like to get arrested together?”

“I understand your concerns, Lieutenant,” Nelson said, choosing his words carefully. “And your points are valid. But Leroy Johnson, Samuel Jackson, and Patricia Oaks are the best suspects we have right now, and you’re the best detective we have right now. As far as Clarisse Williams, we’re going to wait until at least this afternoon to call that a kidnapping, if we choose to go that route. But the long and short of it is this: We have to find these people and I need to know if you’re committed to doing that.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“I need to know if you’re committed to doing that, Lieutenant.”

Ramirez thought of what would happen to Leroy and Black if someone else found them first. He thought of how cops treated suspects who were involved in police shootings or police assaults. He thought of how he would feel knowing that he had let innocent people die at the hands of cops who blamed them for something they didn’t do. He thought of all those things, and the question he had been burning to ask came tumbling out before he could stop it.

“How many times have you watched innocent people go to jail?” Ramirez said, looking at Nelson with weary resignation.

Nelson gave him a long, hard look. Then he walked back over to his chair and sat down, staring into his terminal with the faraway gaze of a man staring into his past.

“Never,” Nelson said. “I’ve never watched an innocent person go to jail, Lieutenant. You know why? Because it doesn’t matter whether someone is guilty of committing a crime. What matters is that we make an arrest, gather enough evidence to make it stick, and let the district attorney prove that person’s guilt in a court of law. If the district attorney can’t do that, the suspect’s innocent and he walks.”

Nelson’s face took on the hard lines of a man who had long ago stopped believing in the very system he was sworn to uphold. Ramirez thought he saw something between those lines. Sadness, maybe. But he couldn’t be sure.

“What matters is that the system works. Not whether some piper pulled the trigger. Now, I need to know if you’re still with us on this investigation, Lieutenant. Because if you’re not, I’m going to have to find someone to take your place.”

Ramirez didn’t answer. So Hillman spoke for the both of them.

“Commissioner, I’m going to be straight with you,” he said. “I’ve been around this department as long as you have, and I’ve seen all the things you’re talking about, more times than I care to recall. I know that I’ve helped send innocent people to jail. We all have. But I can’t stand here and watch it happen this time. I just can’t.”

“And what makes this time so special, Detective?”

“Do you know what happened after I talked with Darnell Thomas this morning?” Hillman said, his eyes drilling into Nelson’s. “A reporter got a tape of the interrogation and he was killed in the parking lot by a police officer. He was murdered, Commissioner, by Lieutenant Darren Morgan of Internal Affairs.”

Nelson returned Hillman’s stare. “If you can prove that, Hillman, we can go out and bring him in right now. But if you can’t, I don’t want to hear it.”

“What’s the difference, sir?” Ramirez said. “How come we can bring in Black and Leroy on next to nothing, but we have to have irrefutable proof that Morgan killed the reporter?”

“You know why.”

“Let me guess,” Hillman said. “Because we take care of our own? Because we’re supposed to look the other way when an officer breaks the law? Commissioner, Morgan and someone in this department conspired to kill Podres, and now they’re killing anyone who gets too close to the truth.”

“Hillman, you’re making all these allegations without a shred of proof,” Nelson said. “The two of you come marching in here like the gestapo, and I’m supposed to just take your word for it that police officers are going around killing people?”

“We’ve got an eyewitness at the hospital who saw Morgan leaving the scene of the shooting this morning,” Hillman said. “He gave us a partial license plate of 342. I checked. The only operational city vehicle with the numbers 342 is assigned to Internal Affairs.

“You don’t have to take our word for it, sir. But the longer we wait, the worse it’s going to get. We just saw Morgan leave the Roundhouse with another reporter. And I believe that she’s going to wind up dead, too.”

Nelson turned his head, as if to say he was no longer listening.

“Don’t you see?” Hillman said, his voice filled with exasperation. “They’re covering their tracks.”

“You keep saying
they,
like you know for sure that this other person is someone from within the department,” Nelson said. “But you don’t know that.”

Hillman flipped through his notes again. “You’re right, sir. I don’t know. But I do know this. Morgan killed Henry Moore over a tape containing this description: a tall white man with blond hair and blue eyes, wearing black pants, a white shirt, and . . .”

Hillman flipped through his notes some more. “Here it is . . . a heavy gold link bracelet.”

Nelson’s mouth dropped open. “What did you say?”

“I said a white man with—”

“No,” Nelson said. “Repeat the last part.”

“A heavy gold link bracelet.”

“Oh my God,” Nelson said.

“What?” Ramirez said. “What is it, sir?”

“That’s Sheldon.”

Nelson agreed to allow Ramirez and Hillman to search for Sheldon and Morgan, but he stopped short of calling off the search for the original suspects. If they were completely innocent of the charges, he reasoned, they would never have fled in the first place.